Handyman dad builds a smart camera that tells him when his baby is hungry

cry mostly the only communication tool a child hasor at least the most powerful, and they are very good at using it.

Children cry for various reasons. Basically when hungry or sleeping. but also when experience any pain or discomfort.

Engineer Caleb Olson just became a father and his biggest problem is that his son rudely wakes up his wife when he is hungry, crying with all his might.

Caleb Olson managed to create a smart camera that detects when a baby is hungry minutes before they burst into tears.

Get mobile notification and so you have a few precious minutes to feed him before he wakes his wife. Another advantage is that, according to pediatricians, when a child cries from hunger, it is more difficult to feed him because he is nervous. With this system, he has not yet reached the critical phase, and it is easier to feed him.

How did this engineer get Do you know when a child is about to cry from hunger? Caleb Olson researched dozens of parenting forums and blogslooking for warning signs that a baby is starting to starve before it starts crying.

The first hint is that children begin to open their mouths, and wet your lips with your tongue, or bite them. He used a software called MediaPipe which allows create face meshes, recording of facial muscle movements.

Thanks to this software, he could, for example, distinguish between opening his mouth and yawning.

Another sign that the baby is hungry is that throw away the pacifier. He tried to program an algorithm for the camera to detect when the pacifier was far from his mouth, but found that it was easier to use artificial intelligence which uses machine learning to determine when a baby has a pacifier in its mouth and when it doesn’t.

The third unambiguous symptom of hunger is that child raises fist to mouth. He created a grid system that 12 recognition points in each handto know when the child squeezes it into a fist and brings it to his mouth.

By adding all these signals and some others, such as the most powerful movements in bed, Caleb Olson created software that turns any webcam into a Hungry Baby alarm clock, as he calls it. You can see how it works in the introductory video of the news.

At the end, Olson makes it clear that do not use this alarm clock as your child’s only mealtime systemand that both he and his wife are following the pediatrician’s recommendations for nutrition, not what the program says.

A very curious idea, which, although it guarantees that it “patent pending“, we don’t think it has a great commercial future. The authorities aren’t going to let AI control when the baby is hungry and when to feed him.